


I’m the king of what could have been

by sidnihoudini



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-07
Updated: 2007-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:36:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean dies and becomes an afterlife secretary. Yes, really. / "Still rockin' the meat suit," Dean would grin and smile every time, shaking his head a little as he clicked around Sam's profile. "Attaboy, Sammy."</p>
            </blockquote>





	I’m the king of what could have been

In a big fat fucking kick in the shins, the first "honest" full-time job that Dean holds is filing the deceased life's records. Yeah, that's pretty funny. But it definitely gets funnier, in that knocked down when you're already out type of way.

 

.

 

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, all those years Dean had expected to go out in a blaze of glory – pistols firing from each hand as he dove behind a tombstone, eleven-inch blade dug into his chest and twisted, severing arteries and slugging him clean. Fuck, when he was twenty seven he still day dreamed about the night it'd all end, except the ante had since been upped, and Dean had found himself seeing Demons having their way with him, exorcisms gone entirely wrong.

Dean never expected to get hit by a bicyclist and die in a hospital due to a lethal injection of penicillin. Which, come to find out, he was _deathly_ allergic to. And, standing there, looking over his own swollen face and bruised rib, he thought about how, technically he had been dead before. But this time was different – just like the battle of age versus death sentence and diving behind a tombstone versus severed insides, things had changed since dad had been alive.

So he hadn't hung around that time to have a slumber party with Sammy, spy his broken heart and try both their hands at a Ouija board. After making a bunch of hushed promises in Sam's ear that he knew would never be heard, he wandered around looking for a reaper or whoever was going to hold his hand across the death rainbow – tried to make it quick because he knew Sam was only two shots of tequila away from going to the crossroads and making a deal with the devil that would all out end the trilogy of Stupid Ideas the Winchester Men Had.

Without really knowing what had happened, he'd gone and done it. Made the big jump and ran into the white light. Half-expecting a trap door to open and have him fall thirteen stories into the great depths of hell, he'd been surprised when the gates had swung open to a dimly lit room, and maybe there were colors inside that Dean had never seen before, but despite all of the bells and whistles he knew the afterlife was equipped with, he was pretty underwhelmed when he realized it was just another office.

"What the fu..." He'd started, eyebrows knotted as he twisted on one foot to look around the room. Mostly empty out front, but there were a couple of bookshelves of files and a desk set in the middle of the room, and who knew what was behind that. A pencil and Windows 98 computer, and maybe he hadn't really died, he'd started to think then, maybe this was just some really weird trip...

Then someone scared the shit out of him by coming up from behind and saying, "Ah, you're finally here."

Dean twisted around quickly, but felt his heart sink when he reached for his belt and all he grasped at was air. No gun, no knives, not even a damned machete.

He really had a soft spot for the machete.

"Who are you," He asked in the way that wasn't even a question, as he let his fingers curl into a fist at his hip – eyes snapping around the room, looking for a 'quick! break here!' fire axe. The woman standing in front of him wasn't a lot unlike the crossroads devil herself: fiery hair, dark eyes, impeccably dressed – dressed to Dean's taste, at least.

She smiled and raised her eyebrows. "You didn't think you'd get to _relax_ for eternity, did you?"

Something about the tone in her voice made Dean's stomach drop all the way to his knees.

 

.

 

So that's how he'd become a fucking, glorified afterlife secretary. He had to do the whole nine yards, too, licking the envelope and everything, and Dean didn't know who the fuck you sent _letters_ to in the afterlife, but he wasn't about to bitch about it. Again. Instead he sat there day in and day out despite the fact that, in this world, there was no real concept of life, and filed newcomers' reports into the system. Shirley, dead at age eighty two due to heart failure; Tom, twenty, fell off a ladder after trying to do a homage to _Jackass_; Mary, newborn, still-birth.

Sometimes he had to grit his teeth a whole lot as he fed the reports into the system, trying not to read the smallest of details. All he really had was a soul, technically, but he figured that somewhere in here, his heart and conscious had to be at least floating around. It was pretty cool to find out about dead celebrities before _Star_ did, though.

"Bus crashed into a tree north of Vermont," Helena – his boss, the woman who'd met him the first day – said with a grin, slamming an armload of files down against the edge of his desk. Dean had looked up with a scowl on his face, but she'd only smiled bigger. She knew. "Just think, Winchester, only another ninety nine years of this and then you get off free."

Dean mumbled under his breath, "I'd rather burn in hell," and was pretty sure his voice slipped by her, unheard.

 

.

 

Or not.

Two hours spent down below, trapped among cages made of bone and gut-rot walls, Dean had been begging and dancing around on the balls of both feet to keep the hot coals from burning his skin clean off. He was standing in fire up to his ankles one second, and falling face down on the Berber carpet of his office the next. And, to make it even worse, the very first thing he saw was the pointy toe of Helena's shoe.

"Never again," He groaned, using one elbow as leverage so he could roll himself onto his back. He focused in on her upside down face and saw a pleased little smirk at the fact that he felt like he had a sunburn everywhere. "You bitch. You really are the devil."

 

.

 

Despite the fact that work days are twenty hours long – in the afterlife you don't _need_ sleep, you know, even though he fucking _coveted_ it, secretly of course – Dean still managed to keep tabs on Sam, checked his file a couple times a week.

_Status: Animate  
Last Update: +3 Hours Ago_

"Still rockin' the meat suit," Dean would grin and smile every time, shaking his head a little as he clicked around Sam's profile. "Attaboy, Sammy."

He'd leave the page tab open through most of his shift, usually, just to be sure. That way, at least if something happened, he would know.

 

.

 

The two hours a day he didn't work, he'd take to relaxing in this little cot set-up behind the racks of file folders, and reminisce about stuff like pecans and hoagies and late-night TV. He didn't get to watch a lot of it, admittedly, but sometimes when he couldn't sleep, and the motel didn't have a pay by the hour cable service, he'd do a little flip-through and land on an infomercial for this or that. Most things diced, some chopped or blended. Secretly, Dean always sought after the Magic Bullet.

There were a lot of things he'd think about in that two hours where he didn't have human codes and compositions to keep his brain levelled with, and sometimes he almost thought he was okay with it, at the thought of being – being _dead_ – but, for the first few months at least, every time he got a half second to think, what he realized was: all he really wanted, was to go back. Maybe set a few things right.

He'd never gone through the seven steps, or whatever the fuck those things were, you know: bargaining, grief, anger, all that. He had known death too personally in his mortal life to bother with wasting time, but sometimes it just, sometimes the concept of what happened to him really kicked his ass. More frequently he found himself stumbling back out of the break room with red eyes and a soggy nose, and Helena never said anything to him – she wasn't the kind of woman to offer sympathy – but Dean figured she knew what was up all along.

And, regrettably, one time, in a particularly self-loathing phase, Dean had gone back to the database after his break and typed in _Winchester J._

A list of ancestors popped up on screen, nothing too surprising, and Dean had to scroll a little bit until he got to _John – deceased 2006_. He'd double-clicked his father's name (he was figuring this computer thing out) and felt his stomach rot a bit and turn sour when the full profile loaded.

_Status: Departed  
Stage: Seventh Level  
Time Remaining: Unknown_

Choking back a sob, Dean was just so glad that Sam had never really known for sure.

 

.

 

_Sam Winchester  
Status: Animate  
Last Update: Current_

 

.

 

Up there, or down below or wherever the fuck Dean was, two years really felt like it stretched on forever. And before it, and possibly after, Dean had never really understood the concept of 'forever.' It was just another word that sat alongside things like "best friends" and "unicorn club."

So for two years, he sits at that desk, typing away, and he gets up to 120 wpm. He thinks that, in the afterlife, it should really be something more like 9000, that would be pretty cool. He doesn't just type with both pointer fingers anymore, either. He even uses his thumbs. His back doesn't creak once, he never gets carpal tunnel, and the tiny type on the computer screen has yet to affect his vision. When he realizes that there is nothing that can break the spell of ninety eight more years of this – this monotony – he secretly, in a little compartment tucked away in the back of his head, thinks "drone drone drone" over and over and would give anything – literally _anything_ – to be in a back woods road somewhere, driving the impala at 120 with Sam laughing beside him. He wouldn't even bitch at Sam for dangling his hand out the window.

He'd give anything, he thinks he'll say to Helena one day, before he realizes: they've already taken everything away.

 

.

 

Five years in, a girl named Holly drops onto the floor right in front of Dean's desk. It's out of nowhere and he visibly jumps, slamming both his hands into the keyboard by accident. In the word document he's been spell-checking (still can't manage _mischievous_ without clicking the little blue checkmark), he adds _lkhdwfkldf._

"What the fu—" He starts to say, before Helena saunters into the room.

She's got a smirk on her face like she's about to take life away, and Dean has to close his eyes as she presses her palm to the side of the girl's head, and sucks something from her. Helena's got something for keeps, now. For the next one hundred years at least.

Or not, because it turns out Holly's only stuck in limbo for twenty. In a moment of decadence, Dean finds himself relieved that he at least gets a bit of half-assed company for at least that long. Helena has Holly run the photocopier day in and day out, though all three of them know that paper trails are meant to be broken, and most all of the new information coming in is immediately submitted to the computer. Holly gets a sunburn from the flashing lights and ink poisoning from the black trays for her efforts, and Dean finds himself trying to remember a couple of lame knock-knock jokes to kill time with. Maybe if she smiles...

He thinks on it for days, eyebrows knotted as he types away, efforts mechanical by now. It guts him when he starts to realize that everything from _back then_ just seems to fade away more and more as each shift goes by, and by the time he realizes that the harder he tries to remember the things he knew back then, the more he has to struggle.

"Your name was Dean Winchester," He whispers at the computer screen, in the dead of the day when all he can hear are Holly's fingernails scratching over the equipment out back, pounds of paper being thrown from shelf to shelf. "DC fucking ruled, and you liked the donuts with the little sprinkles on top." Desperate, he backspaces quickly. Three words disappear – he frowns and licks his lips. Tenses his jaw. "When you were thirteen, you..."

Staring at the mirror reflection of himself projected in the darker parts of the computer monitor, he shakes his head, and tries to work down the feeling of needles prickling at the backs of his eyes.

Another five years of this, and he knows he won't remember much at all.

 

.

 

_Sam Winchester  
Status: Updating  
Last Update: Unknown_

 

.

 

In a suddenly compulsive need to remember, Dean starts to jot down things – just little things – that he remembers on note paper. He hides the few pieces in his top drawer, and doesn't bring attention to the fact that they're there – won't even read them in front of Holly, tries not to think about them when Helena's around.

_when you were 19 you cracked the bone in your hand, the curved one right underneath your thumb. you cracked it straight clean from one side to the other and couldn't hold your gun without shaking for weeks. dad was pissed off but sammy drew all over your cast. you were 19 so you thought you were too cool for little felt-tip drawings from your brother, but you slept with your arm tucked under the covers like it meant something. when dad cut it off, he tossed it in the garbage underneath the bathroom sink at a truck stop in idaho, and you felt sloppy and sorry for weeks._

Sliding the top drawer shut, he turns back to the computer, and, glancing at Helena's office door, tries to type a little faster to make up for lost time.

 

.

 

Dean comes to find out that Holly committed suicide after being bullied one too many times by another girl at her school.

"It's fine, though. I mean." She looks down at the stack of photocopy in her hands, and brushes a piece of hair away from her face. Dean still feels his spine twitch when she looks at him with these undead eyes. "I wanted it."

Nodding, Dean's eyebrows bunch up tight as he narrows his eyes and says, "Yeah. Yeah, of course."

"How was high school for you?" Holly asks, leaning a hip against the corner of Dean's desk. She's not as cautious around Helena as Dean is, relaxing every hour and taking time to fix up her hair, but Dean only knows it's because Holly doesn't know what she's capable of. "What was it like?"

Licking his lips, Dean relaxes in the office chair a bit, but looks back at his monitor.

"Weird. I went to two or three every year." Tilts his head to the side a bit, looks at her from the corners of his eyes. "Only graduated because I had to."

She looks all interested, shows it by leaning in a bit more. "What, were you like, did you have an army dad or something?"

"Yeah," Dean laughs uncomfortably, clicking around on the computer to feign being busy. "Or something."

 

.

 

_you kissed sam for the first time in nebraska, but it was only because you figured you were about to die. something had caught dad, and you were devastated, so you ran into a pissed-off spirit full clip. it chewed you up and spit you out just cause it knew it could, but it hadn't killed you. you still thought you were going to bleed to death, though, cause dad wasn't there to patch you up, so you ran back to the motel and sammy was sitting just inside the main door with a shotgun in his lap, wide-awake. you hadn't been home for days. he'd looked up and you'd looked down at him with these wide eyes and blood dripping out of your mouth, all down your face, and then you dropped to your knees and kissed him real hard, even left the motel door wide open cause you thought it was over. _

the shotgun dropped to the floor and sam jerked back right away, but he was pinned to the door and let you kiss him anyways. when you fell back he pulled away, and you only managed to flip and crawl the one foot to the door before puking out all over the front stoop. sam jumped up and ran to get the paper towels while you rolled against the doorway, collapsing against the dirty carpet so you could bleed all over the floor and your clothes.

dad didn't come back for two days after that, but you didn't die, either.

 

.

 

"I think the system's down," Dean says, poking his head into the doorway of Helena's office. She's sitting at her desk with these black rimmed glasses on her nose, reading over something and signing off on someone's life like it's a moderately sized bank transfer. Millions of people die each day, Dean knows that he personally files about 75 000 of them, but it's only every few years that a single person is dropped into this particular office. Dean raises his eyebrows, and taps his fingers in a macabre rhythm against the inside of the doorframe.

Helena doesn't say anything. She barely acknowledges him at all, instead leaning forward over those long legs of hers, palm sliding over her desk to make a few clicks on her computer.

"Looks fine to me," She says, but even then it's after a moment, as she looks at him over the edge of her computer monitor.

Dean's stomach bumps around inside his middle for a split second, nerves making his insides jangle like brass. "Really. Cause a lot of profiles have been offline the last two days."

She crooked-smiles at him, humouring, and slips the glasses up from her nose to rest against the top of her head.

"Really." She looks at him like he's just a petulant child gripping to her skirts. It makes him feel small. "Which ones?"

Dean swallows, he knows he's just been caught. "I don't know. Random ones. Does it matter?"

"If they're offline," She says to him, carefully, like she's told him this before. She hasn't. "It means their status has changed."

Palms sweaty, sudden, and Dean counts backwards in his head. It's been five, no six – maybe seven or eight – nine at the most, nine years tops since he ended up here. 365 day years, at least, but that's not how they count them here.

"How long does it take to update with the new status?" He asks, gripping the doorframe close to his chest.

Helena grins and goes back to her record books, signing something else. Heart rate monitors going flat all over the world.

"About three shifts," She tells him, the sharp scratch of her pen against paper the loudest thing Dean has heard in years.

.

 

Holly vanishes the next day. Dean has no idea where she disappears to or why she does, because she's there one second but gone the next. When he hears the crackling of concentrated energy and looks up to clouded air, he raises his eyebrows, hunter instincts dulled, completely faded after too many years spent as a drone behind a desk. Holly's looking at him one second, young wide eyes, and gone the next.

When Helena comes into the office a few hours later, she looks irritated another hand has been lost.

"Where'd she go," Dean asks his computer screen, obsessively refreshing Sam's profile.

Helena jerks a record book out of the wall case. "She was needed somewhere else," She grits through her teeth. "Wrong placement, apparently."

Dean reloads Sammy's profile one last time, and has his heart stop dead in his chest.

 

.

 

_Sam Winchester  
Status: Departed  
Stage: Unknown  
Time Remaining: Unknown_

 

.

 

At first, he figures it's merely a technical error, and, after cross-checking _this_ Sam Winchester with all the other _S_ and _Samuel Winchester_s on file, Dean decides that it's _definitely_ a technical error, because the birth date and residence check out. Somebody fucked up, which is fine, because Dean knows that in his first couple of weeks on the job, he definitely changed the status on some kids who may or may not have actually been dead.

Trial and error, and all that. No big.

And no problem, Dean decides, typing in a couple of passwords and bypassing the security screen to the edit profile page. Sam's not exactly on his roster, but whatever, it's his _brother_. Dean deletes the word '_deceased_' and changes Sam's status to '_active_.'

And, for about fifteen minutes, that's exactly what it says Sam is: alive.

But just before his break, Dean refreshes one last time, and breathes a little heavier when it again reads _deceased._

"Fuck," He whispers to absolutely no one, voice rough, as he shoves himself away from the desk. One heavy fist pounding down against the keyboard, Dean simultaneously cuts the side of his hand on the keyboard drawer, and falls out of his office chair.

 

.

 

Helena smirks when she hears another, more resounding, '_fuck!_' come from the attached room, and flips through another form. She's known for days: Samuel Winchester, dead in his late-somethings after one too many one man battles with a demon.

But not the kind you think. Because this one, it lived in his chest, in the back of his head, and it nit-picked at his brain until Sam listened long enough to pull the trigger one last time.

 

.

 

"You bitch."

Helena isn't surprised when Dean turns up in her doorway less than fifteen minutes later. His eyes are red, bloodshot, and he looks furious – Helena hasn't seen him this alive in _years._

"You knew," He accuses.

She licks her lips, glossy lips, and glances up. "Of course I knew. I signed for him three days ago."

This knocks Dean back a few feet, Helena physically watches him reel back, take a step. Another. "What?"

"Killed himself, baby." She grins and leans further back into her office chair, leather and daunting and Dean doesn't know if it's her he's talking about or the office furniture as she crosses one leg over the other. "Just the kind of death I _like_."

Dean feels like the wind has been knocked out of him: he clutches at the doorframe with one hand, white. "He what?"

"Colt revolver." She presses her lips together and tilts her head; she know the name has relevance, resonates in Dean. "One last shot."

Squeezing his back molars together, Dean feels the groan of his teeth, the pressure building. "When."

"A week ago." She's answering him too fast, she loves this. "They managed to keep him in a coma for a couple of days. Would you believe he missed, and only blew out one side of his head?"

Now, picture this: Dean, nostrils flaring, desperate not to fucking splinter, rocking from hip to hip (back to hip to hip) in the Devil's doorway. He can see it inside his head, the inside of _his_ head, these flashes of the blood and the gore, splattered up against a fresh white wall. Sam had continued to hunt? Or had it been vindication in a college dorm, the apartment he shared with his roommate – girlfriend – wife – boyfriend?

The last one hurt the most.

"Anyway." Helena flips back a page on her clipboard, searching. "Other than a couple of," She offers Dean a pointed look. "_Minor_ sins, the boy's wholesome enough to... you know. Not spend a lifetime condemned to fire and brimstone, all that. In fact, he's on his way to some prime upstairs real estate right now."

Dean accidentally bumps the doorframe with his hip. "I want to see him."

"Can't," She offers shortly, smiling as she reaches for a black inked pen. "But you knew that."

Three strides and he's in front of her desk, a toxic look on his face.

"Bull fucking shit. You can." He palms a stack of already signed papers, death sentences. "What do you want."

"For you to file my papers for eternity." She stops, opens her mouth and taps the pen to her chin. "Oh... wait."

Dean, licking his lips, grits his teeth and spits, "Fuck you."

"It's going to take you more lifetimes than you can count on both hands to catch up to your beloved," She smiles, looking pleasant as she leans back in her chair and looks up at Dean. Just when he thinks he's about to spit, she lowers her voice and tilts her head gently. "In fact, you'll see _daddy_ first."

Not knowing what else to do, Dean feels the electric sparks of unconditional rage chew through him, and without thinking, he slams his fist down, hard, against the top of her desk. Helena even jumps a bit, startled.

"Fuck you, bitch," He grits, leaning in so their breathing the same air. In thirty seconds, everything he used to be comes flooding back through his veins, and he feels alive, thrumming, with adrenaline all of a sudden. Helena laughs shortly, and looks up at him over the rim of her glasses. "Whatever you want," He tells her, opening his palm to press flat against the desk top. "You've fucking got it. Fifteen minutes, that's all."

Helena meets his eye. In an instant, he's levelled. "Ten."

Launching himself over the desk, he grabs the sides of her face, and, pushing his thumbs into her cheekbones just hard enough to bruise, kisses her.

 

.

 

_you were shit scared of the dark when you were 2 years old. imagine that, huh. you were scared cause you didn't know what lived in it, and you'd keep your eyes wide all night, even though all you could focus in on was the edge of the window. you wouldn't fall asleep until you were about to puke from lack of energy, but you gave up every time, always succumbed to nodding off. sam slept in the crib across the room from you, and every night, you secretly wondered if the dark had got to him, too._

 

.

 

Dean is expecting a lot of things. For one, a big blowout in the side of Sam's head, maybe some dangling brains. He paces back and forth in the little break room hidden behind the death files, wondering if Sam's going to fall out of nowhere like Holly had, or if he'd just... walk through the door. Do dead people walk through doors in the afterlife? Dean doesn't have a body of knowledge in this one.

He scrubs a hand over his face when he can't figure out what else to do with his fingers, and when he opens his eyes, Sam's just standing there, in front of him, looking a few years older but just the same.

"Dean," He breathes, this expression spread across his face like he resigned to a lot of things a lot of years ago, and he just steps forward and wraps Dean up in this hug that lasts forever. Sam's face is pressed tight into his shoulder – Dean feels smaller than he ever remembers being, but grips at the back of Sam's jacket the whole time.

When they pull out of the hug, Dean's brain is hopelessly ticking down – _eight minutes that's all you have, _Helena says, from somewhere inside the front of his head.

"Where's dad?" Sam's looking around with these huge wide eyes like they're really in the middle of a hunt and a vampire has suddenly carried off a member of their family – Dean realizes he's still holding onto Sam's jacket sleeve. "Who else is here? What is this?"

Dean shakes his head, doesn't know where to start. "Death records. I file them."

A stunned expression crosses Sam's face as he looks around the room, and Dean tightens his grip until his fingers are wrapping around Sam's wrist as far as they can go. Sam's cold, really cold, and it makes Dean's stomach jerk around.

"I only got ten minutes," Dean manages, not saying that now it's really more like six. "Before you... go, again."

Sam rubs at his eyes and now, more than ever, Dean wishes he hadn't ever gotten out of the Impala that day. In a wave of bile that rises from his stomach, he wishes that he had been the one who hit the bicyclist.

"Why'd you do it," Dean whispers before he really knows what he's asking.

Laughing uncomfortably, Sam rests his hand over the left side of his head. "So you know."

"_Yeah_, I know," Dean says, louder than he meant to say it. He lowers his voice to a sigh. "Fuck, Sammy."

Then they're hugging again, and Dean's nose is mashed against Sam's shoulder as they clutch at each other and get windswept in the romantic novel cliché of it all. Except it's not a cliché, it's a fucking death office a couple miles north of hell, and Dean hasn't seen his brother in years, won't see him again for more days than he's known him: a lifetime.

"I missed you so bad," Sam manages into the side of Dean's head. "You don't know what it's like."

Without saying anything, Dean decides he does know. If it had been him, left alone, he would've pulled the trigger too. He wouldn't have thought twice.

"Doesn't matter," Dean says into the fabric rumpled over Sam's shoulder. He presses his cheek into the cold muscle there, and grabs at Sam's back, pulling them tighter. Sam nods.

It doesn't, anymore.

 

.

 

When Helena pulls Sam back, Dean doesn't even know it's coming. One second they're touching, and the next Dean is grasping at cold, empty air. Stumbling back from the force of the energy suddenly gone, Dean regains his footing just before he falls shoulder first into the office wall. And he tries hard, tries real fucking hard, not to grasp at the short straws he's been left.

Squaring his shoulders, he jerks his jaw out, raises his head, and tries to stand up. Tries to keep going – he's done it three times before, maybe this time it won't be as hard.

But in reality: it's more difficult than anything else to do.

 

.

 

Kids come and go through the office over the next couple of years. Dean hasn't yet figured out Helena's reasoning behind the people she chooses to come and work for her, but enough bodies float around for Dean to actively decide that he won't bother learning anymore of their names. He doesn't scribble memories anymore, either, hasn't for a year now at least. He reasons that he doesn't see the point in it anymore: he can barely remember what he looked like back then, when he was up there.

"You're so _dead_ now, Dean," She tells him one morning, raising both eyebrows up into easy points over the rim of her coffee cup.

So the Devil has a few vices, Dean has come to find.

And, Dean, white as a – ha – ghost, tightens his jaw, he's been doing a lot of that lately, and enters a few lines of data for some homicide in Pasadena. He does it in record time, because he's been doing a lot of that lately, too.

"If the shoe _fits_," He snaps back at her, in the same tone she'd been talking to him in. And she smiles, she fucking smiles like nothing is wrong, and leans one hip up against the edge of her office doorframe, arm bending up behind her head.

And just to spite him, to pour salt in his already infested wounds, she cocks her head and asks, "So. Just how long _would_ you consider two lifetimes, exactly?"

He doesn't give her the satisfaction of an answer, but when she turns to go back into her office, both hands cupped around her coffee mug like she's _cold_, he grits his teeth together, and tells his computer screen, "Forever."

Over the years, he's told this monitor more things than he ever did to anyone – _anyone¬_ – when he was up there.

 

.

 

John's out of hell a few months after that, after so many human hours spent in hell that Dean doesn't even know where to start counting. He only knows John's left the great below when he's checking through the most recent transfer list, a 60 000 page document that takes fourteen and a half of Dean's shifts to get through.

_John Winchester  
Status: Transmitting  
Next Level: Transfer  
Arrival Date: Unknown_

Is what it tells him, and for Dean, just knowing that his father isn't down there anymore is good enough for him. Enough to keep plugging along, to handle Helena's stupid smile and ruined expressions.

But despite it all, he still hasn't got enough balls to look up his own profile.

 

.

 

Dean is kneeling beside a rack of files that Helena accidentally set on fire the other night. She'd been in a rage over one thing or another, Dean doesn't even remember, but he'd come along after her punches thrown, and carefully doused the moderately sized flame with the fire extinguisher. So now he's on the floor, searching for one file copy in particular, when someone knocks at the front wall of the office. Surprised (the only office who's never had a patient through the main door, and Dean runs it), he sets the still sizzling copy of one Mr. James Connor McRadden, deceased, on the floor. Wipes his palms off on the knees of his jeans, not at all worn during the entire time he's lived here, and gets up to peer through Helena's office door.

She's not at her desk.

Debating whether or not to just ignore it, Dean's about to go back to the file copy when the door creaks open.

"What the fu – " Dean swears, mouth dropping open.

In the doorway, Sam, one hand in his jean jacket pocket, the other on the door knob.

 

.

 

"For fucks sake," Helena is swearing, throwing files around on her desk as Dean stands in front of it, smug. "That fucking _bitch_ in staffing did this to me – did _you_ have anything to do with this?"

Holding his palms face out, Dean raises his eyebrows and tries not to listen to Sam's keyboard ticking away in the next room.

"He's not going to be here forever," Helena snaps at him, swearing again when she catches her hand on the edge of the desk. "Don't get used to it."

Dean is already slipping out the office door, something sounding a lot like, "okay," trailing out behind him.

 

.

 

It doesn't matter how much time Sam has to stick around the office; Dean doesn't even ask how he managed it, all he knows is that he doesn't care.

"This guy had a rupture in his heart valve, but they didn't find it until a week later when the muscle broke, and the _wall burst,_" Sam tells him, sounding awed at the thought. Dean, working through an updated transfer list, glances up from the stack of paper, and raises his eyebrows.

"No kidding," He says, but doesn't mention how awesome that guy was that had the intense complication after the aortic incision. Or the guy who survived after getting hit by a bus, but died when his buddies dog bit him and it got infected a week later.

And they don't talk about it, not about the time they have left together, not about how they both royally fucked up, and Dean sure the fuck never mentions all the things he wishes he could've done. But they manage, and Helena even gets used to Sam's presence a lot like she got used to Dean's.

"We'll be fine," Sam promises him one night, when Dean's trying to relax on the wool cot and Sam's stretching his arms up over his head. With an easy (too easy) half-smile and a pop out of his shoulder blade, Sam bends over and promises him, "Anything that comes after this will be easy."

Staring at the ceiling, too many nights of solidarity weighing heavy on his chest, Dean blinks a couple of times, and sounds unsure at best as he answers, "Yeah."

 

.

 

Dean doesn't write anymore, but Sam's nosier than he's ever been. One night, he finds the short stack of wrinkled papers tucked deep in a drawer of Dean's desk, hidden between file folders and a little half-empty box of paper clips.

 

.

 

_the night you realized you'd do anything for him was when you were almost eighteen. you realized you'd drop everything and run if he asked you too, and it was scary enough to warrant fucking anything with legs. when he left a few years later you let him go because you knew it was what he wanted. dad bitched about him and you made due by rampaging through spirits and demons, but you never felt alright, never felt the same as you did when you were with him. all you thought about the first six months was sam's goddamned hands, his elbows, the motherfucking column of his neck. and you missed him hard enough to give up, and that's when dad left. he said it was because he knew you were skilled enough to fight alone, but you always knew better._

thinking of sam like that, all it did was slow you down. and

 

.

And that was where it ended. Now, Sam, bent down beside Dean's desk, glances over his shoulder at Dean. Dean, placated into rifling through a shelf full of folders; Dean, who doesn't say much anymore, who looks at Sam with these empty eyes that _scare_ him. Sam wonders if that's how all dead people are, if he's the same, but decides that he'd rather not know.

"Dean," Sam says, carefully, closing the drawer and standing up. His knees don't creak like they used to.

Dean is side-tracked at best as he says, half-heartedly, "Yeah."

Pausing, one hand motioning like it knows what it wants to say before his head does, Sam opens his mouth, stops again, and frowns.

Dean, I drank more than I ever have in the last ten years. Dean, I tried to resurrect you but it was really a two-man job. Dean, I went to the crossroads that night, but it was too late. Dean, it's so easy to sell your soul in heaven, you wouldn't even believe...

"Where'd that Silverman file go?" He asks instead of saying anything else, leaning back over the desk.

Because it isn't the same anymore – Dean's dead, so is he. Dean is _dead _and maybe it looks like Dean but it'll never be the same.

"Left drawer, second folder in," Dean replies, automatically, and doesn't even bother to look back.


End file.
